Heriot Read online

  ‘Which tribe?’ asked Wish, but Heriot didn’t know.

  The three men stopped working, straightened up, and began to wander up the hill, joking and laughing with each other, but for some reason Heriot didn’t want to go back to the farm. He hesitated, watching them climb, half-expecting Radley, at least, to turn and call him to heel. But they went on and up, past Draevo and out of sight, talking all the time without noticing he wasn’t tagging along behind.

  Heriot turned towards the sea and the dark forests of Cassio’s Island. He didn’t want to see Azelma again, or hear her suggest he was different from everyone else in his family. He didn’t want to be forced into thinking of himself as anything but plain and mostly invisible.

  Somewhere on Cassio’s Island was a port where ships put in, and somewhere beyond the forests a city that held the castle of the Hero – one of the two great spirits of Hoad – at present alive in the person of Carlyon of County Doro. Somewhere on that Island lived a whole population of men and women who were loyal to the Hero first and King second. This was not only allowed, it was an ancient rule.

  ‘It keeps the King just a little humble,’ Great-Great-Aunt Jen had once declared. ‘Once the Kings of Hoad used to be the Heroes as well, but it’s too much glory for one man to have both Hero and King alive in him at the same time. Sometimes they’re contrary spirits. They might tear him apart.’

  The causeway was still green, a quick arrow pointing out to the Island. On a day like this, a fine day when usual events were yielding to strange ones, someone might walk along the causeway and step on to Cassio’s Island, and stand in another country just for a little while. It was not forbidden; it was just something no one in the Tarbas family had ever done … at least not as far as Heriot knew.

  Two years earlier he had stood on that hilltop with his family, looking down on the causeway at glittering columns of men and women. According to the customs of Hoad, a young man called Carlyon had challenged the Hero, Link, and the King and his court were carrying him to combat in the Hero’s Arena. To Heriot, looking down from above, the parade had seemed more than royal. It had seemed to him not a company of mere Kings and Princes, but one of sun-bears, centaurs and strange, stalking birds as beautiful and passing as dreams. Three days later they had returned, carrying Link’s body in great splendour, leaving young Carlyon, Hero by conquest, to discover the Island on his own and take possession of his hidden city. Heriot had believed the whole world was being paraded past the farm in a glittering thread so he could take note of it, but by now brambles and wild grasses were pushing in on either side of the narrow road which, on this particular day, at this particular time, was totally deserted.

  And now, as he walked along the causeway, with his whole family left behind him on the other side of the hill, Heriot was seized with a lonely elation, and began to run and leap and to fling up his arms, chanting under his breath, spinning wildly, shouting wordlessly. Feeling he could twist all the way to the island, he turned cartwheels, until he toppled over, laughing as he fell, only to sit up in the middle of the road, staring wildly around him.

  Then he relaxed, laughed at himself yet again, and breathed deeply, taking conscious pleasure in the smell of salt and seaweed, and the lap and rattle of water in the rocks on either side. The thought that the sound went on and on like that (water on rock, rock on water), whether there was anyone to listen to it or not, gave him a sort of relief. Free at last, he thought, without having the least idea just what it was he had been freed from, and set off once more along the wild road … the central seam of the causeway.

  Directly before him at the end of the road was a stone arch.

  At first it seemed enormously far away, and insignificant compared with the wide expanses of sea and sky, but suddenly he found he could not look around it or over it any more. Suddenly it had become the only thing the world had to show him.

  A great fountain of seawater erupted beyond it, and then another and another. Heriot approached it warily. Increasingly the arch seemed to drain colour and shape out of everything around it, even from the water and the autumn air.

  4

  The Dissolving Window

  And then, at last, he had reached it, was walking under it, then standing for a moment to read the inscribed names of the Heroes. Carlyon’s name was there, freshly cut into the old rock. Heriot put a tentative hand to touch the names, trying to imagine his own name carved among them. But the stone would not accept his name, even in imagination. He wasn’t noble, and only men who were born to nobility were free to fight on Cassio’s Island. Heriot moved out from under the arch to stand on the island itself.

  Directly in front of him, the forest began. Looking into it he felt his first uneasiness grow stronger. It could not be shaken off. On his right, the road skirted the edge of the wood for a little way, while on his left, the long sinuous swelling waves cast themselves on to the rocks over and over again. Fountains of spray, forcing their way through unseen blowholes, leaped into the air, while the whole island creaked and muttered and gurgled. Heriot could hear it, even though he was concentrating on something else.

  The forest in front of him had a door. It hung on huge iron hinges between two columns of black stone. But there were no walls on either side, and it was a gate that seemed to demand walls.

  ‘No wall!’ Heriot mumbled. ‘Door but no wall! Hey, you! You couldn’t keep a cat out! It’d just walk round you.’ But the door would not be mocked. Out of its stones and iron and its dense wood there reflected, like ancient stored heat, a terrible weariness, as if the gate might choose to fall on him, crushing him into the dirt, out of boredom and nothing more. Not only this, little by little he began to feel certain that someone was watching him.

  Abruptly he was invaded by a single terrifying image. Somewhere behind his eyes a window of black glass sprang into existence. It seemed it had always been there, though he had only just become aware of it, and he suddenly believed that, for years and years, a hand had been rubbing, rubbing against the glass with a soft patience as the black barrier had grown thin and then thinner. In a minute it would finally dissolve under the pressure of the preoccupied hand. In another moment he would be able to look not only forwards but backwards too – far backwards – backwards into himself, and he would see something terrifying – something that would change him for ever.

  This waking dream, almost a vision, came and went in a moment, but it frightened him so fiercely he spun away from the gate, and saw, in the long grass on his right, a flattened patch as if some animal, no larger than a dog had been lying there. The grass blades were still moving, in the act of springing up again. Heriot understood that, only a moment earlier, something must have been curled up there, hiding itself from the world. Only a moment earlier something must have been watching his approach and had chosen to disappear. He clapped a hand over his puzzled eye and stared at the space with the eye that saw straight. Then, turning abruptly, he fled from the gate without a wall and from the flattened patch of grass, away from the fringe of Cassio’s Wood, out under the arch and on to the causeway.

  5

  On the Causeway

  Once again it seemed to stretch endlessly before him, dimmer and cooler than it had been, for a drift of cloud had sidled over the face of the sun. Its beauty was still there, but it no longer moved him. As he had walked towards the island its great length had not mattered. Now the causeway seemed endless. He needed to get himself home again – he needed to be contained once more, surrounded by cheerful arrivals, happy endings.

  But even the causeway wasn’t endless. Panting and struggling and sprinkled with the first rain, he reached the place where he could climb away from it. He was just about to leap on to the slopes of his own farm when something happened that was beyond description. He stopped mid-stride, falling to his knees as if he had been clubbed down. Deep inside his head that black barrier was finally dissolving. Something from the other side rushed out and ran through him like a contradiction of everythi
ng homely. Something looked directly out into the world for the first time, using Heriot’s eyes. And for some reason the most frightening thing was that this intruding force was not a stranger, but a wild part of himself … a part of himself he had never suspected, but which he immediately recognised. At some time in the past something had happened to him; had violated him over and over again; something had fed on him. Somehow, back then, during the time of his fits and headaches, perhaps, he had been torn in two, and now, suddenly he was confronted with that other – that torn-away self. But now, though it was part of him, this rag of self was a stranger, settling back into him without fusing into him, becoming an occupant.

  The landscape in front of him, the whole hillside broke into a shifting mosaic of coloured crystals, skewed madly, and contracted, before swelling back into a recognisable form, while Heriot, filled with a terror so extreme it was like pain, toppled sideways on to the edge of the path and lay there, whining through clenched teeth, clutching the grass stems and worked on by such vertigo that, even with the whole earth bearing up under him, he still believed he was falling. Inside his head something demanded recognition. He gasped. Inside his head, that new, separate self breathed in too … a gigantic first breath.

  In the outside world Heriot gasped again. ‘It’s all right!’ he muttered. ‘It will be all right. Take another breath. Last a bit longer. It will end.’ This was what he had learned to say to himself during the violent cramps, fits, and headaches of his early childhood … those times when he felt that something was stealing whole pieces of him … devouring him. ‘It will end,’ he repeated, though he couldn’t hear his own voice. ‘It will end. It will be over.’

  Now, as if he were looking out of blackness through a far-off window, unnaturally clear, he saw the boy of his dreams, not in bed this time but standing on a great confused plain, dressed in rich strange clothes, staring back at him.

  ‘Help me,’ he said, but the boy looked frightened and puzzled, then vanished as completely as if he had been blown out. In the silence that followed, he heard, coming in at him from somewhere, a deep, slow breathing, and made himself breathe in time with it. It was several minutes before he understood it was only the sound of the sea.

  He opened his eyes, and looked into a tuft of grass half an inch from his nose. Fear continued to subside. He began to move his hands and feet, to sit up, to stand, to run. For then, indeed, he did run. He scrambled wildly until he was back on Tarbas land.

  He had changed. Something new was stirring in him … a new nerve … a new appetite, anxious to be fed. However he was too alarmed to try and make any real contact with this … this thing … this wild presence he had carried within himself unknowingly until it had swept in from the other side of the black barrier. He began climbing again, and kept on climbing until he reached the spot where, only a little time ago, he had stood beside his brother and looked out over the sea to Cassio’s Island.

  Something moved on the road below. Heriot stared down, screwing up his face a little as wind blew in on him.

  Someone was walking away from the Cassio’s Island. He stared, narrowing his eyes. A woman carrying something heavy – a woman carrying a child who lay limply in her arms, while another child trailed behind her, getting left behind and running, every now and then, to catch up. But the woman seemed to take no notice of her follower. She stumped along, looking neither right nor left, up nor down, looking straight ahead as if the road might vanish if she took her eyes from it. The child behind her, on the other hand, was staring around all the time, and suddenly came to a standstill. Looking up, it had seen Heriot standing on his hilltop looking down. Knowing he was seen, Heriot waved rather incoherently, feeling himself become more wonderfully ordinary by making this ordinary human sign. The child stared up at him for a moment longer, then waved back, before turning, and racing after the woman who had walked on, without once glancing over her shoulder at the child she was leaving behind.

  There was a flash of lightning and a sound as if a tin sky were being beaten apart. Unable to distinguish any longer between inside events and outside ones, Heriot half-believed he was responsible for the harsh sound, but it was only the storm sweeping in from the north-east. The bruised sky had taken on a luminous sheen, but directly overhead the sun still shone through a haze of finer cloud. Heriot turned and ran. He was going home with the storm growling at his heels.

  But the day had not finished with him. Though Heriot believed that, after what he had just gone through, he couldn’t be frightened any more, he was wrong. His strange ordeal on the causeway had prepared the way for yet more terror, and this time there would be witnesses.

  6

  An Unfinished Smile

  Heriot had left the courtyard full of women but came home to find men drinking and gossiping, as they watched the storm roll over the hills. Radley, Wish and Nesbit, tall and bushy as trees, were planted in the centre of the yard with a younger cousin, Carron, beside them, just as tall but narrower, more agile and more wordy, too. There were about ten Travellers, both short and tall, and a neighbour or two. The courtyard was bathed in a wild light, the sun shining rebelliously through the first clouds, painting the western hills, which in turn reflected distant light from their jagged crests down into the courtyard. The men stood in an unnatural coppery glow that was flicked occasionally with whips of lightning.

  As he slid through the gate Heriot heard Carron holding forth in his quick, eager way, to one of the Travellers. He closed the gate behind him, then leaned against it, breathless with exhaustion and relief.

  ‘They’d call that treason,’ he heard the Traveller saying to Carron in a startled voice. ‘Their present King may be a Secondcomer, but we have to count them as men of Hoad by now, even if we were here first. And lucky for us, if they do have a King to keep them in order.’

  Heriot could see Nesbit rolling his eyes at Wish, full of despair at Carron’s dangerous arguments.

  ‘If there’s a King, the King should be one of the first people … one of us,’ argued Carron. ‘Not that we really need a King or a Hero. A long time ago even the Secondcomers … the Hoadara … used to choose their leaders. All the people got together and worked things out between themselves. Every man counted. It wasn’t just one family with all the power.’

  Heriot stared. He blinked and shook his head, then stared again. Someone was standing behind Carron, someone he hadn’t noticed when he first came through the gate, though, now he had seen this stranger, it seemed impossible to notice anyone else. He screwed up his face trying to focus on a man who seemed painted with a darkness that had sunk into him, right to his bones. Cut, this man would bleed black. Even his face and hands were shadowed, which made his light eyes, fixed intently on Carron, particularly startling. And his hair was red – a crimson both dark and bright, braided and wound into a tight cap around his head.

  Heriot, still unnoticed, moved a step or two closer, frowning and doubtfully biting his lower lip. There was something about the stranger’s stillness that made his heart jolt unpleasantly. Even the most impassive faces have some sort of movement, but this face was entirely frozen. Light reflected oddly from the upward turn of an unpleasing smile … a smile begun but unconcluded, as unnatural as a diving gull arrested mid-air.

  ‘Heriot!’ shouted Radley, suddenly noticing him standing in the gateway. ‘Where did you get to? We could have done with an extra pair of hands.’

  As if the sound of Heriot’s name had somehow released him, the frozen stranger’s half-finished smile suddenly widened. He gracefully embraced Carron from behind, by flinging one arm around his neck, and at the same time drove a narrow blade into him. Heriot thought he felt the thin destruction of his own heart.

  ‘And another thing …’ Carron said, turning to the Traveller on his left, apparently unconcerned by what had happened. At the same time Heriot began tasting blood. His own mouth was suddenly full of it. He gave a cry. The sound that ripped out of him was inhuman even in his own ears. Everyo
ne in the courtyard started and spun round. Radley ran towards him, followed by Wish and Nesbit, while Carron, looking more curious than concerned, came behind them. As he advanced on Heriot, Carron’s eyes darkened. Crimson curtains were being drawn across them. They filmed, then overflowed with tears of blood, which left trails on his cheeks and blotched the stones of the courtyard behind him. Heriot screamed again, backing away, but, as Radley reached him, he turned, seized his brother, and buried his face against him so that he needn’t see any more.

  A great babble of voices blended into the single sound that was most familiar to him … the sound of family interest and argument. The kitchen door flew open, the footsteps and voices of women asking questions rang above the exclamations of the men.

  Radley was shouting. ‘What’s happened? Let’s take a look.’

  But Heriot didn’t want to look up and find himself staring into Carron’s bleeding eyes. Something splashed on his hands, and he started and cried out as if the drops had burned him.

  ‘It’s rain, Heriot, nothing but rain!’ Radley cried, shaking him slightly. ‘Stop it! There’s nothing wrong.’

  ‘It’s blood!’ Heriot repeated.

  ‘There’s no blood here but yours,’ said Radley, so bewildered he sounded angry. ‘You’ve bitten your lip I think. That’s all.’

  ‘What’s wrong? What’s happened?’ Joan was asking … Ashet was asking … Baba was asking … their voices coming in on top of each other.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Great-Great-Aunt Jen, and everyone heard her question.

  ‘That’s the sort of thing I was telling you about.’ Carron’s voice sounded somewhere in the background. ‘They make out there’s nothing to it, but he’s always likely to flip.’